Best apps for editing RAW files

With the new iPhones being able to capture RAW photo files – and if you listen carefully, you can hear the gleeful, sobbing cheers of photographers across the globe – editing your pictures right on your iPhone 7 or iPhone 7 Plus is a must.

Here are a few different apps to consider while you edit through your RAW photos. Good luck, and happy (RAW) shooting!

Lightroom Mobile

Adobe's Lightroom Mobile app not only lets you shoot in RAW, it's one of the best image editors for iOS out there. You can edit your photo's white balance, temperature, exposure, tone curve, color, and more, and add pre-made filters and vignette frames.

Everything syncs with Adobe's Creative Cloud service, too, so if you use Lightroom on the desktop, your images and edits will appear on your Mac. As such, you may need a Creative Cloud account to use some Lightroom Mobile features.

Snapseed

Snapseed is a powerful RAW photo editor that rivals some of the more expensive editing apps. With it's fast filtering options or manual editing abilities, Snapseed is a great app that helps you edit your photos into crystal clear, modern masterpieces.

Crop, transform, brush, heal, enhance grain, adjust contrast, and so much more for RAW files specifically. All you have to do is upload your picture and start editing – Snapseed's menu is incredibly straight forward to follow with clear instructions on how to properly tweak and improve your pictures.

If you're looking for some editing-specific features for portraits, then Snapseed even has options like Glamour Glow and face-specific tweaks that help bump your selfie from a 9 to a 10, and if you wanted a little more fun in your photos, you can always add vintage, retrolux, or noir filters to your iPhoneography pics, too!

Darkroom

With professional desktop editing programs, you're able to have complete control over elements like shadows, highlights, contrast, and so much more. Darkroom makes this easy by allowing users to fix their RAW photos with a classic curve editor along with specific editing elements, like vibrance, cropping, etc.

With Darkroom's pro kit – which costs $5.49 – you're even able to use filter sharing where you can edit and create your own customized photo filters that will link to your Instagram account – so if your filter gets popular, you get followers!

VSCO does a really great job of keeping things as simple as possible while editing. The app's minimalist layout makes navigating the editing process easy, and with access to things like brightening, contrast, rotating, sharpening, highlight & shadow control, temperature control, and so much more, there are dozens of ways you can edit your RAW iPhoneography.

While VSCO itself is free, there are plenty of filters and filter bundles that you can pick up on the app itself – and trust me, they're not a waste of money! Every VSCO filter brings something beautiful and unique to a photo.

Afterlight

Editing your RAW photos can sometimes be a bit of a challenge, but Afterlight makes getting creative with your iPhoneography fun with their dozens of filters, adjustment tools, and so much more!

Whether you're a photography expert, or someone who's just getting used to their new iPhone 7 or iPhone 7 Plus' camera, Afterlight has a little bit of something for everyone. From specific contrast, vibrance, cropping, and saturation controls, to basic filters, frames and photo effects, you'll be able to edit your RAW photography effortlessly.

Afterlight is also a great tool for social media posts, allowing users to experiment with layering photos and adding shape-specific cut outs like letters or silhouettes to their iPhoneography.

I don't think VSCO and Afterlight are actually able to work with the RAW files. It seems these apps are just using the embedded preview JPEG in lower resolution (0.5 MP instead of 12 MP). Please update this article with information about real RAW apps, that allow to "develop" the RAW (DNG) files and then save the result as JPEG with full resolution. Examples are Snapseed, Lightroom, PhotoRaw and RAW by 500px.

Didn't try Lightroom Mobile, but after testing the other apps mentioned here, Snapseed is the only other app that can actually edit a DNG file on iPhone. As gewappnet mentioned, all these other apps edit the small JPG preview of the DNG file.